


arma virumque cano

by veilchenjaeger



Category: The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
Genre: Character Study, Established Relationship, First Impressions, M/M, Metaphors, Softness, who needs plot if you have Odyssey quotes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-03 01:57:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21171536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veilchenjaeger/pseuds/veilchenjaeger
Summary: Esca has that tendency to slip right through his fingers. Every time Marcus thinks he has him figured out, something shifts and changes and he’s looking at the ruins of the image he built up.-Marcus can't sleep and reminisces about a hundred first impressions.





	arma virumque cano

**Author's Note:**

> Is this the least creative title you can give an Eagle fic? Probably. Have I been waiting for the right thing to give this title to for the past two years? Definitely. Enjoy the SWP (Softness Without Plot).

Marcus doesn’t sleep well. He hasn’t in quite some time, so it’s neither a surprise nor an issue. He’s gotten used to it, assessed the damage it does and worked on balancing it out. His routine accommodates waking in the middle of the night to a moon-lit room, the remnants of a dream heavy in his throat. It accommodates nerves jittering too much to let him rest for more than a few hours at a time, until he hears something or other that wakes him from his half-sleep, and it accommodates sleeping through a night, because sometimes, that happens, too.

Tonight is one of the jittery ones.

He can’t remember his dream. He usually does in the first moments after he wakes, but he’s been sitting awake for a while now. It doesn’t matter; he knows his dreams and they’re not worth worrying about. Not anymore.

The peacefulness of it all is still so foreign to him when he’s awake, so he’ll leave his dreams some time to catch up. Eventually, they’ll need to come up with new images to shake him. Forcing his head in place and his eyes open to watch his father die doesn’t cut it anymore, now that he’s seen the battlefield and heard what truly happened.

It’s a full moon night. Maybe that’s messing with his nerves, too. He’s opened a window despite the chill outside. (And despite Esca’s silent protest, his scowl that seemed to say, _You got out of a fever a mere week ago. Don’t tempt it to come back._ But Esca had been tired, eyes half-lidded and everything about him, even his scowls, softer than they are in daylight.)

Now the round, pale white moon is in the upper centre of that window, drenching the whole room in light. It’s so bright the milky way disappears, like the moon’s sucked in all of the stars and the light they cast.

Marcus could close the window, he supposes, and try to go back to sleep, but he’s gotten caught up.

He’s sat up on the bed and shifted to lean against the wall, settled in for a long night. He’s not tired. He’s not quite ready to go back to his dreams when his waking hours look like this.

He’s watching Esca. Not quite marvelling at him – he did that earlier this night – but quietly wondering, maybe, about him and the parts of him Marcus can’t quite grasp yet.

On the narrow bed, it’s impossible for them not to touch. Esca sleeps on his side – Marcus doesn’t, Marcus sleeps on his stomach, but he did wake up with his arm around Esca’s waist tonight – so the front of his body is slightly pressed against the side of Marcus’. He doesn’t give off a lot of body heat, usually; he keeps his warmth to himself, but in contrast to the chilly air, the places where they’re touching are comfortingly hot. Marcus can feel the subtle, even movements of his breathing against his skin.

The moonlight allows him to see every crease on Esca’s face, the slight arch of his brow, the light dust of stubble on his chin. Esca looks much younger when he’s asleep. The worry-lines on his face are gone in a way they never are in daylight, not even when he smiles as brightly as he sometimes does these days.

They’re like scars, in a way. Esca has other scars too, some cut by swords and spears, and more sliced by whips. (There’s a heavy one on his lower back, stark white like the moonlight. Marcus traced it from his side to the base of his spine tonight, until Esca took his hand away and interlaced their fingers. _Stop doing that. Stop worrying about it_, in the gentlest way possible.) By comparison, they are barely worth mentioning. All the pain that was connected to them is gone. It’s the scars on his face, the few early wrinkles and the sharp-cut lines of his seemingly permanent frown, that still hurt.

When he’s asleep, it looks like that pain has never touched him at all. He’s peaceful, now. Relaxed. A young, beautiful man without a care in the world.

He fell asleep under these sheets tonight, his skin radiating warmth, shoddily cleaned up, with a light sheen of sweat still on his brow. Marcus kept his arms around him all through the final beats of coming down from the high, the silent kisses shared (silent and light; they had still been exhausted from the deep ones), the soft murmur of “I love you” he’d left against Esca’s skin. He hadn’t been able to keep his eyes open for long enough to see Esca fall asleep.

It’s still new to touch him like this. They shared a bed for the second time tonight, and the novelty of it ached.

There are things they should talk about, maybe. Wretched things, wedges between them. The issue of fucking the man he used to own, ironically made relevant by its very legitimacy and telling acceptability; the issue of the space between them too, and how love fits into the greater political structures of their lives. Et cetera, et cetera.

It’s not important right now. It wasn’t tonight. After their first night – that rush of heat and bliss and ache, when everything that happened in the past months had come crashing down and Marcus had realised, more intimately than ever before, that _Oh, I love him. I need him_. Untouched by the banality of them here, on a simple bed in a simply furnished room in his uncle’s house – after that, he’d thought about bringing it up. He hadn’t.

He’d been caught up in getting over the first impression. Esca has that tendency to slip right through his fingers. Every time Marcus thinks he has him figured out, something shifts and changes and he’s looking at the ruins of the image he built up.

It’s basic military strategy not to let your opponent see exactly what you are planning. If you’re good at it, you can win a battle by changing your formation, or moving troops to the front lines that you had previously held back, or letting those come from the side that you had hidden away behind a hill. Alexander won wars by destroying his enemies’ first impressions.

Esca is a prodigy at this. It’s a good thing they’re not at war.

He leaves a hundred impressions, and half of them are firsts. Marcus collects them. Right now, he’s filing away one of Esca asleep, safe and sound, blissfully exhausted. It’s not the first time he’s seen Esca sleep. He’d first noticed how young he looks like this in the low light of a campfire in the highlands. But with everything that’s changed between them since, it might just as well be the first time.

So Marcus uses the moonlight to really look at him. Take it all in, all the details.

He’d missed out on doing that the very first time he saw him. Maybe because he hadn't expected to ever see him again, hadn't expected him to enter his life with the force of heavy artillery - sudden and world-shaking, then slowly settling in, allowing Marcus to catalogue the damage done. Tearing wreckage into the old walls and making space for something new.

In the theatre, he’d looked at Esca through a film of his own grief. Maybe – and Marcus isn’t proud to admit it – he hadn’t really seen Esca at all. Oh, of course, he’d left an impression. The greatest one anything had left in months, ever since Marcus’ life had been neatly shredded into pieces and he’d been left to rot. A man brave and stubborn enough to throw his only defences away in the face of death would leave an impression on anyone.

But all in all, that man in the arena had not yet been _Esca_. He’d been nameless, then, though that’s difficult to remember now that his name has become so familiar. (Marcus said it tonight, a million times.) Faceless, too – it’s hard to make out faces from the ranks of an amphitheatre.

Marcus had filled in the gaps seamlessly. The man he’d watched enter the arena and give himself over to death had been himself as much as it had been Esca; maybe even more so, because he hadn’t known that there was an Esca yet.

He’d seen a man shunned by the world, broken and beaten, who’d lost everything he might once have had. A hopeless man in a cage without exit, unable to move neither forward nor backward. No chance to get out the way he’d come in, no road ahead even if he fought.

That man had had only one way out, and he had recognised that it was death.

No poet ever sang of a man and the weapons he threw to the ground. Usually, that’s because it would be a short story to tell.

Marcus had decided, then, not to make that story end just yet. To strive for something, even if it’s nothing to sing tales of, just a while longer; let the man in the arena live. He had meant nothing by it.

It’s not the story of a first impression he wants to tell. The only things that stuck with him afterwards, when Esca had gotten a face and a name, were his pride and his bravery, the way he’d offered himself to being beaten to death with his back straight and his head raised. Marcus had seen that same pride in Esca’s eyes when he’d sworn an oath to him, and quite probably, he’d retroactively added that same look to the (now named) man in the arena, too.

Maybe that had been the real first impression, then. The moment Esca had become _Esca_. It’s not much of a pretty story to tell, either. A black eye and a bruised body aren’t really what you want to remember when you think about the first time you met the man you love.

Let’s start there, anyways. The Esca his uncle had introduced to him had been neither young nor beautiful. He’d looked at Marcus through one badly swollen eye, the bile and the venom in that one look surrounded by red and blue and ugly violet. There had been worry-scars all over his face.

He’d been proud and earnest and bitter, so fucking bitter. He’d fit in perfectly with the man in the arena, only that this time, he’d thrown a dagger to the ground instead of a sword and the death he resigned himself to was handing his freedom to Marcus on a silver platter.

The Esca Marcus had met that day was a man who could swear loyalty to someone he’d cursed in the same breath. He had also cast his gaze down to the floor, taken the venom out of it, and shifted so completely Marcus had felt like he’d just met him twice within one conversation.

A rollback, the battered cavalry retreating from the frontlines to be replaced by an impenetrable shield wall. Words like _obedience_ and _inconspicuousness_ written on the shields as lucky charms, meant to direct any hostile projectiles elsewhere.

Marcus had emerged from that conversation with a severe case of whiplash. Had they been at war, he would have been more akin to Darius, losing Gaugamela to the Macedons, than any kind of Alexander. (Not quite, though. Where Darius had run, Marcus stood his ground and started cataloguing the damage.)

The next first impression had been a gentler one. Breathing space, maybe, between the wars. A hand on the back of Marcus’ neck, the shake of a head. Nothing more and nothing less, just a tiny peek through the shield wall before the lines closed again. Marcus had been too dizzy to remember much of it.

After that, he’d gotten used to meeting Esca again every once in a while. The man he’d followed through the highlands had been a different one entirely, full of confidence and the old, native knowledge only those who grew up with it can really acquire.

That had been a foreign man speaking in a foreign tongue, and whenever he’d resorted to accented Latin, it had been to tell Marcus in detail just how little he truly knew about Esca.

In his defence, it is difficult to get to know someone who only ever gives you first impressions. Maybe that’s why Marcus had been able to discard everything he had previously collected when he’d met Esca the liar, the actor. Technically, that had been an accurate first impression, too. Marcus had just misjudged what he’d been lying about.

He can’t say which of these firsts he had initially started falling in love with. None of these people had been anything like the young man sleeping next to Marcus right now. The impressions they’d left wouldn’t have allowed Marcus to imagine him smiling at him brightly and unguarded, walking next to him in energetic lockstep. He would have seemed out of place with his arms around Marcus’ neck, leaving light kisses all over his face. He couldn’t have ended up falling asleep in this bed, letting himself be held.

Maybe then, the real first impression had been one left months after they’d first talked to each other. Marcus remembers it vividly; Esca, his voice low and his hands gentle, waking him, and how it had all slotted into place, somehow. He had spent the past weeks looking for Esca, looking at him, trying to figure him out. He’d missed his first chance at it and never gotten more than glimpses.

He’d learnt to look. (Maybe learnt it from Esca – Esca looks right through things, and people, even those he is about to kill. Marcus doesn’t know how he lives like that.) And Esca, for the first time in months, had given him something to look at.

So that’s the first impression. Esca had started leaving second impressions, then, too. Third, even. Fourth. Building up the image of a man who’d move armies with how much he cares. Every general needs a driving force. Alexander’s had been hubris; Esca’s is love.

It had won them a battle. Not a metaphorical one, this time.

And he still meets Esca all over again, sometimes. He’s learning to enjoy it. It means discovering something new about him, and recently, that has been synonymous with finding more to fall in love with.

There had been the aftermath of it all, the first time the deeper lines on Esca’s face had made way to an easy smile and a light-hearted quip. The first press of lips against lips, a breathless declaration. The first impression of Esca in his arms, his mouth on Marcus’ neck, taking and being taken apart by each other and trusting each other enough to let it happen. A bone-deep comfort like coming home.

Marcus collects first impressions to piece them together, and maybe eventually figure out a whole. (Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον. Poets do sing of complicated men. Marcus is vaguely certain that Esca would not appreciate being sung about, nonetheless.)

It’s the middle of the night, and the moon has moved to the top right corner of the window. It’s blinding in that position. The air has shifted from chilly to frosty now that the last bit of day warmth it had captured has been spent. Esca is unbothered by these things, still sound asleep in the small space he occupies between the covers, the wall, and Marcus.

If he’s dreaming, it doesn’t show on his face. He looks more vulnerable like this than he’d ever let himself look when he’s awake. Marcus feels like it might be a what-if. What if some things had never happened? What if life had never scarred him? Then that’s what he might always look like.

Maybe it’s time to join him again. Marcus doesn’t think he’ll sleep anytime soon, especially not well, but the cold is getting to him, and Esca is right. He can’t risk another bout of fever.

It’s strange how he can so very clearly imagine the way Esca would look at him if he were awake to tell him to _Close the window. You can’t get sick again_. How familiar he has become with all his first impressions.

Marcus smiles down at him. He gets up slowly, careful not to cause too much noise. Is Esca a light sleeper? That’s another thing about him Marcus will have to find out.

For now, he closes the window. His eyes adjust to the darkness quickly; there’s still a bit of light falling through the cut-outs in the wooden window pane. Just enough to make out the way back to the bed and find Esca there, blinking awake when Marcus settles next to him.

Light sleeper, then.

For a mere heartbeat, he’s caught somewhere between sleep and waking with bright, searching eyes. Then, the worry-scars return and make him age by years.

“What are you doing?” he asks, voice thick with sleep.

Marcus looks him over. He’s handsome still; all edges and sharp lines, from his cheekbones to his nose to his jawline. Scarred so deeply, around his eyes and on his forehead, between his perpetually set brows, but that doesn’t take anything away from him. Marcus didn’t fall in love with a what-if.

“Closed the window,” he answers. He draws the covers over both of their shoulders. They’re warmed up, shelter from the cold. “Woke up a while ago.”

Esca relaxes. One, two lines disappear from his face. Never all of them, especially not if there’s still a bit of worry in his eyes. He’s looking at Marcus in the same way Marcus tries to look at him, though Esca is much better at it. He’ll have it figured out within a fortnight, of course, everything about nightmares and jittery nerves.

Or maybe he already figured it out up in the highlands, or much earlier than that. Marcus might be a commander, but he’s only good at military strategy if it doesn’t take place in metaphors.

“Go back to sleep,” Esca tells him, and it’s halfway a question – _Can you?_ – and halfway gentle advice.

Marcus wraps his arms around him and pulls him in, taking in the warmth he lost to the autumn chill, feeling Esca shift with him until they’re almost face to face. One of Esca’s hands comes up to settle against his neck with a gentle brush along his jawline. Marcus runs his fingers up and down Esca’s spine.

“I love you,” he says quietly. _I love every part of you. Every first impression. The things I don’t understand yet, too._

Esca’s eyes are closed – he’s already drifting off to sleep – but he opens them again for just a moment. His fingers press into Marcus’ neck and his jaw, pulling him closer just a little to reach him. He kisses his cheek first, just once, then the corner of his mouth. His lips linger there a little longer, and Marcus thinks he could fall asleep like this. (Might be good against the nightmares.)

It’s a number of replies, all too long to be spoken with a sleep-heavy tongue. (_I heard you; I know you do; I love you too, in all those same ways._)

The issue with poems is that they are limited to words.

**Author's Note:**

> The translation of πολύτροπον as "complicated" belongs to Emily Wilson, of course. If you don't compare the person you love to classical heroes, are you really in love?
> 
> A very big shoutout to @fanpersoningfox and another dear friend for the endlessly patient beta. You're the real MVPs.


End file.
